"Holy Scripture is the faultless, most true, most perfect, and most holy law of God, which it is the duty of all men to know, to defend, and to observe, inasmuch as they are bound to serve the Lord in accordance with it, under the promise of an eternal reward." John Wycliffe
No name in all the long history of the English Bible occupies a more honorable place than that of John Wycliffe. To him belongs the unique honor of being the first to give the English peoples the whole Bible in their own tongue. He was a great pioneer of freedom alike in Church and State. A scholar and a thinker, he had great influence in all the upheavals of his time; but above all else, he was a Christian patriot who wished all men to hear the Word of God for themselves and to be free in Christ. It is hardly possible to overrate the significance of his work, at once for the English people and for the English language. More than aught else, it kept alive in the hearts of the people that irrepressible spirit of free inquiry which led to the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Many are of opinion that Chaucer's 'parsoun of a toune,' so winsome and faithful, was no other than Wycliffe, whose teaching the great poet had embraced; and from many points of view there are few, if any, English workers and writers who more deserve the gratitude of the whole nation.
Wycliffe was a great scholar and an ardent patriot, a lover of the Gospel and intensely brave; but most of all he was a loyal, growing, Christian man. He was a true statesman and man of affairs, wise and conciliatory in all his ways. But he was altogether unyielding where principle and truth were involved; and modern historical research is showing that his work was vastly more fruitful than has sometimes been supposed. Lollardy never died out, either in England or Scotland; and Lollardy was simply the English form of the passive protest against the Mediaeval Church, which under various names maintained itself in France, Germany, and Bohemia, for centuries, in spite of persecution. As late as 1521, the Bishop of London arrested five hundred Lollards; while in 1533, we find Sir Thomas More, in a letter to Erasmus, describing Tyndale and his sympathizers as Wycliffe-ites.
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Even as regards his version of the Bible, his work was far more influential than has often been asserted. Professor Plumptre, writing some fifty years ago, said: "The work of Wycliffe stands by itself. Whatever power it exercised in preparing the way for the Reformation of the sixteenth century, it had no perceptible influence on later translations." But Dr. Moulton has since shown that there is so much in common in language and expression between Wycliffe and Tyndale, that it is probable that the earlier Wycliffe renderings had passed into general currency and become almost proverbial phrases. The truth is, as Forshall and Madden, the editors of The Wycliffe Versions, put it, that in the Reformation era these versions supplied an example and a model to those excellent men, who in like manner devoted themselves at the hazard of their lives to the translation of Scripture, and to its publication among the people of the land. Even yet there are at least one hundred and fifty manuscripts extant containing the whole or part of Purvey 's Bible, the majority of which were written within the space of forty years from its being finished. And many of these are full of interest and must have exerted a great influence. If some of them could tell the story of their wanderings and their work it would be a fascinating tale. One belonged to Edward VI. Another was a birthday present to Queen Elizabeth from her chaplain. Another belonged to Henry VI. ; and yet another to Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
The exact date of Wycliffe's birth is unknown; but it was somewhere about 1324; perhaps a few years earlier. He grew up in his native county of Yorkshire, and studied at Oxford, where he distinguished himself greatly alike as a scholar and as an administrator. He took an active part in guiding Edward III. and the English people to reject the Papal claim to feudatory tribute; and for a time had much influence in public affairs. He incurred the deep enmity of the Romish hierarchy, but there were always friends who saved him from the consequences of its wrath. He advanced step by step in his opposition to formalism and priestism in religion, and to the prevalent corruption in morals. He wrote tracts in English for the common people; and organized a band of preachers, called the Poor Priests, who went through the country preaching his doctrines of grace. And so he was led on to the great work of translation which occupied his later years. He had laid it down as fundamental that God's Word must be taught because it is the indispensable bread of life, the seed of regeneration and conversion. The next step was to see and determine that the Bible must be rendered into the language of the people, so that it might be known everywhere as God's good news of salvation. That was the next step, the natural and obvious step when once it had been taken; but it had never been taken before, and all honor to the heroic man who took it, as Wycliffe did, in loyalty to the logic of the soul.
It is probable that parts of Wycliffe's Bible were issued earlier than 1382; but that was the year in which the whole book was finished two years before his death. It was translated from the Vulgate, the Latin version that is, which had been in use since the time of Jerome in the beginning of the fifth century. The time had not yet come for a rendering from the original Hebrew and Greek. Neither of these languages was at that time taught in the West. Of the actual work of translation, only the New Testament can be assigned with certainty to Wycliffe himself; his friend Nicholas of Hereford being responsible for most of the Old Testament and of the Apocrypha. What is believed to be the original MS. of his translation is in the Bodleian Library and breaks off at Baruch 3. 20; while in a second MS., copied from it, it is. noted that the translation of Nicholas ended there. It is generally supposed that Wycliffe himself did the remainder, and that the work of revising the whole, to which he set himself at once thereafter, occupied the rest of his lifetime.
This revision, however, was a work of time, especially the revision of what Nicholas had done, and Wycliffe was not spared to see it completed. The revised Wycliffe Bible, which is the standard, appeared in 1388, four years after his death. The improvements in it, which were very real, were essentially the work of one man, the trusted friend of the Reformer and in later years his fellow worker, John Purvey, whose name will never be forgotten while that of Wycliffe survives which will surely be as long as the English Bible has its place in our land. When their translation appeared, it was most eagerly received and widely read. Although it cost a sum equal to forty pounds of our money, many copies of it were soon in circulation. Many, of course, had to be content with small portions of it; as, for instance, those who gave a load of hay for a few chapters of an epistle. Touching stories are told of how the people used to gather to hear someone read or even repeat the Word of God in their own speech; and it is not possible to estimate how much this first English Bible must have done to keep the fire burning on the altar in these dark, and in some respects darkening, ages. It had been written for the common people, and they heard it gladly ; and with the spelling modernized it can still be read with ease. It is said that not many years ago long passages from it were read aloud in Yorkshire, when it was found, not only that they were understood by the hearers but that almost every word employed is still in use there.
It was, of course, a great drawback that Wycliffe's translation was from the Latin and not from the original tongues . But nothing else was possible then; and while there is much even in his English which is now archaic, it was the English in which all future English literature was to be written. Just as Luther's Bible stands at the head of the New High German, Wycliffe's opens the period of Middle English. Chaucer is usually taken as representative of the Middle English literature; but although he is the father of English poetry and has some rare features of superiority, the tendency among philologists now is to recognize Wycliffe's prose as the earliest classic Middle English. Chaucer and he stand side by side; and it has been remarked that Wycliffe rises to an uncommon pitch of perspicuity, force, and beauty, in his Bible translation as compared with his other English writings. Doubtless the greatness of his theme inspired and ennobled him all round, just as it was with Tyndale when, a century and a half later, he took up the same great work . Of the later translator it has been remarked that the exquisite grace and melody of the language of his New Testament has been a matter of surprise to those who are familiar with his other writings, which have no qualities that raise them above the ordinary level of the time. Both men made this their life-work, and threw themselves into it, body, soul, and spirit; and the glory of their work and theme pervaded their whole being.
The peculiar glory of Wycliffe, however, in this work of translation is not his style or his services to the English language; but that for high and holy ends he set himself to render the whole Bible into the vernacular. Special portions of it had been already translated for special purposes; but he was the first whose whole being thrilled with the great conception of the Bible for the people, and for the people's use in their own homes. The special merit of His translation is that at the time it was not only the one translation of the whole of the Scriptures into English which had ever been made, but actually by a hundred years the first translation into a European tongue. It is absurd either for Sir Thomas More in his day, or for Father Gasquet in ours, to deny this. What meaning could there have been in the attack on Wycliffe by his contemporaries, had he not been a pioneer?
One Kneighton, a chronicler of the time, writing in all probability before the year 1400, openly laments the translation of the Bible into English, and ascribes the guilt categorically to Wycliffe. He maintained that Christ gave His Gospel, not to the Church, but only to the clergy and doctors of the Church, that they might communicate it to the weaker brethren and the laity according to their need; and he angrily complains that Wycliffe had made the Scriptures common and more open to laymen and to women than it was wont to be to clerks well -learned and of good understanding, so that the pearl of the Gospel is trodden under foot of swine.
The theory of the Mediaeval Church, that any knowledge of the Scriptures which was necessary for the laity should come to them through the clergy, was all the more intolerable in that, as corruptions increased, the clergy did not know the Scriptures themselves so as to be able to break the bread of life to the hungry multitudes who looked up to them to be fed; and so often looked in vain. There were only too many ecclesiastics, like the Bishop of Dunkeld, who thanked God that he knew neither the Old Testament nor the New. In England in the year 1551, out of 311 clerics in the diocese of Gloucester, all incumbents of parishes, who were examined as to their knowledge of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, only 90 passed well or fairly well. No fewer than 171 of them could not repeat the Commandments, 10 could not repeat the Lord's Prayer, and 9 could not repeat the Creed. Manifestly such spiritual guides were not qualified to be the Scriptures for the people, nor were they entitled to offer their teaching as a substitute for the written oracles of God, as they presumed to do.
That Wycliffe was the first who ever set himself to give the whole Bible to the people, or who had in view the needs of the whole community and not merely the convenience of the clergy, is borne out both by friends and foes. In the year 1412, Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury and his suffragan bishops petitioned the Pope to pronounce sentence of condemnation on the heresy of Wycliffe and those who adhered to him. In this document, among other charges brought against the Reformer, one was that he had contended with all his power against the faith and doctrine of the Church, and that in order to make his malice complete he had devised and carried out the plan of a translation of the Holy Scriptures into the mother tongue. In the previous year, too, one of Wycliffe's admirers, John Huss, in a pamphlet against John Stokes, said: "It is plain from his writings that Wycliffe was not a German, but an Englishman ; . . . for the English say he translated the whole Bible from Latin into English."
This, then, is the great and assured place which Wycliffe occupies in the annals of the English Bible; and even if what he gave the people was only a translation of a translation, and perpetuated the errors which had crept into the Vulgate, it was a great gift of God to his age and his land. In some respects, the measure of its worth and influence as it shed light all round the circle of life, and roused men both to their duties and their rights is the greatness of the anger and malice of his foes. But most of all, the measure of its worth is the work it did, and which culminated in the sixteenth century, when the truths for which he had contended proved victorious in so many lands. Wycliffe's Bible began a new era in England and for many beyond it, in things political and social as well as in things spiritual and religious.
Professor Ryan M. Reeves lecture
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